Maybe it’s a bit high but it doesn’t seem crazy to me.
We seem to have a lot of unusually good applications right now and unusually little funding. I also expect to hear back from some large donors later in the year and I expect our donations to increase around giving season (December).
A quick scan of the marginal grants list tells me that many (most?)[1] of these take the form of a salary or stipend over the course of 6-12 months. I don’t understand how the time-value of money could be so out of whack in this case—surely you could grant say half of the requested amount, then do another round in three months once the large donors come around?[2]
Daniel’s comment says “there are a whole host of issues” with this approach. I’d be curious to know what those are, and how they aren’t worth unlocking 40% additional value.
Short-Term Focus: Might inadvertently prioritize research with quick returns over longer, more comprehensive studies that require extensive time and resources.
Administrative Overhead: More frequent grant cycles can increase administrative work in terms of processing, reviewing, and monitoring grants.
Potential for Discontinuity: Some research projects cannot deliver meaningful results in such a short timeframe, leading to potential disruptions if they cannot secure continued funding.
Researcher Uncertainty: Short-term funding might make it difficult for researchers to plan and commit to longer-term research goals.
In addition:
Being an independent researcher on a 12-month grant is already quite rough, moving to a 3-month system is a pretty big ask and I expect us to lose some people to academia or corporate counterfactuals as a result
Most of the people we’re funding have fairly valuable counterfactuals (especially monetarily); if we fund them with 3 months under high researcher uncertainty and potential for discontinuity, I just expect many of our grantees to spend a large fraction of the time job-searching.
For people who are not independent, a 3-months contract makes it very hard to navigate other explicit and implicit commitments (eg project leads will find it hard to find contractors/employees, I’m not sure it’s even possible to fund a graduate student for a fraction of a semester)
Giving us $X now is guaranteed, and we can make grants or plan around them. Maybe giving us $1.4X in the future is more of a hypothetical, and not something that we can by default plan around.
If a large donor is actually in this position, please talk to us so we can either discuss options together and/or secure an explicit commitment that is easier for us to work around.
So these are all reasons that funding upfront is strictly better than in chunks, and I certainly agree. I’m just saying that as a donor, I would have a strong preference for funding 14 researchers in this suboptimal manner vs 10 of similar value paid upfront, and I’m surprised that LTFF doesn’t agree.
Perhaps there are some cases where funding in chunks would be untenable, but that doesn’t seem to be true for most on the list. Again, I’m not saying there is no cost to doing this, but if the space is really funding-constrained as you say 40% of value is an awful lot to give up. Is there not every chance that your next batch of applicants will be just as good, and money will again be tight?
To be clear, I’m not sure I agree with the numbers Caleb gave, and I think they’re somewhat less likely given that we live in a world where we communicated our funding needs. But I also want to emphasize that the comparison-in-practice I’m imagining is (say) $100k real dollars that we’re aware of now vs $140k hypothetical dollars that a donor is thinking of giving to us later but not actually communicating to us; which means from our perspective we’re planning as if that money isn’t real. If people are actually faced with that choice I encourage actually communicating that to us; if nothing else we can probably borrow against that promise and/or make plans as if that money is real (at some discount).
Is there not every chance that your next batch of applicants will be just as good, and money will again be tight?
There’s some chance, sure, but it’s not every chance. Or at least that’s my assumption. If I think averaging 100k/month (or less) is more likely than not to become the “new normal” of LTFF, I think we need to seriously think about scaling down our operations or shutting down.
I don’t think this is very likely given my current understanding of donor preferences and the marginal value of LTFF grants vs other longtermist donation opportunities[1], but of course it’s possible.
I think there is a chicken-and-egg problem with the fund right now, where to do great we need a) great applications b) grant grantmakers/staff/organizational capacity (especially a fund chair) and c) money
Hiring for good grantmakers has never been easy, but I expect it to to be much harder to find a fund chair to replace Asya if we can’t promise them with moderately high probability that we are moving enough money to be worth their time working on the fund, compared to other very high value work that they could be doing (and more prosaically, many potential hires like having a guaranteed salary).
I also expect great applications to start drying up eventually if there continues to be so much funding uncertainty, though there’s still some goodwill we have to burn down and I think problems like that are only going to be significant over the timescale of many months, rather than a few.
The main exception in my mind comes from some other grantmaker rising up in the space and being great, or an existing grantmaker expanding into the space that we currently work in.
Maybe it’s a bit high but it doesn’t seem crazy to me.
We seem to have a lot of unusually good applications right now and unusually little funding. I also expect to hear back from some large donors later in the year and I expect our donations to increase around giving season (December).
A quick scan of the marginal grants list tells me that many (most?)[1] of these take the form of a salary or stipend over the course of 6-12 months. I don’t understand how the time-value of money could be so out of whack in this case—surely you could grant say half of the requested amount, then do another round in three months once the large donors come around?[2]
As for the rest, I don’t see anything on the list that wouldn’t exist in three months.
Daniel’s comment says “there are a whole host of issues” with this approach. I’d be curious to know what those are, and how they aren’t worth unlocking 40% additional value.
GPT-4 gave some reasons here.
In addition:
Being an independent researcher on a 12-month grant is already quite rough, moving to a 3-month system is a pretty big ask and I expect us to lose some people to academia or corporate counterfactuals as a result
Most of the people we’re funding have fairly valuable counterfactuals (especially monetarily); if we fund them with 3 months under high researcher uncertainty and potential for discontinuity, I just expect many of our grantees to spend a large fraction of the time job-searching.
For people who are not independent, a 3-months contract makes it very hard to navigate other explicit and implicit commitments (eg project leads will find it hard to find contractors/employees, I’m not sure it’s even possible to fund a graduate student for a fraction of a semester)
Giving us $X now is guaranteed, and we can make grants or plan around them. Maybe giving us $1.4X in the future is more of a hypothetical, and not something that we can by default plan around.
If a large donor is actually in this position, please talk to us so we can either discuss options together and/or secure an explicit commitment that is easier for us to work around.
So these are all reasons that funding upfront is strictly better than in chunks, and I certainly agree. I’m just saying that as a donor, I would have a strong preference for funding 14 researchers in this suboptimal manner vs 10 of similar value paid upfront, and I’m surprised that LTFF doesn’t agree.
Perhaps there are some cases where funding in chunks would be untenable, but that doesn’t seem to be true for most on the list. Again, I’m not saying there is no cost to doing this, but if the space is really funding-constrained as you say 40% of value is an awful lot to give up. Is there not every chance that your next batch of applicants will be just as good, and money will again be tight?
To be clear, I’m not sure I agree with the numbers Caleb gave, and I think they’re somewhat less likely given that we live in a world where we communicated our funding needs. But I also want to emphasize that the comparison-in-practice I’m imagining is (say) $100k real dollars that we’re aware of now vs $140k hypothetical dollars that a donor is thinking of giving to us later but not actually communicating to us; which means from our perspective we’re planning as if that money isn’t real. If people are actually faced with that choice I encourage actually communicating that to us; if nothing else we can probably borrow against that promise and/or make plans as if that money is real (at some discount).
There’s some chance, sure, but it’s not every chance. Or at least that’s my assumption. If I think averaging 100k/month (or less) is more likely than not to become the “new normal” of LTFF, I think we need to seriously think about scaling down our operations or shutting down.
I don’t think this is very likely given my current understanding of donor preferences and the marginal value of LTFF grants vs other longtermist donation opportunities[1], but of course it’s possible.
I think there is a chicken-and-egg problem with the fund right now, where to do great we need
a) great applications
b) grant grantmakers/staff/organizational capacity (especially a fund chair) and
c) money
Hiring for good grantmakers has never been easy, but I expect it to to be much harder to find a fund chair to replace Asya if we can’t promise them with moderately high probability that we are moving enough money to be worth their time working on the fund, compared to other very high value work that they could be doing (and more prosaically, many potential hires like having a guaranteed salary).
I also expect great applications to start drying up eventually if there continues to be so much funding uncertainty, though there’s still some goodwill we have to burn down and I think problems like that are only going to be significant over the timescale of many months, rather than a few.
The main exception in my mind comes from some other grantmaker rising up in the space and being great, or an existing grantmaker expanding into the space that we currently work in.
That is very different from the question that Caleb was answering—I can totally understand your preference for real vs hypothetical dollars.